Category: Politics

Full disclosure: most of the content of this blog post is not mine. Almost all of it was researched, written and compiled by CarcinLoring at their own personal time and expense. It was, however, presented in a series of ten long Twitter threads, which are not the most easily readable form of presentation, so with Carcin’s permission, I’ve decided to gather it in one easily-accessible place with in-line citations for quick reference.

Carcin, incidentally, is a steadfast activist for the rights of incarcerated people, particularly LGBTQ folk. I would heavily recommend you follow them on Twitter.

Recently, a right-wing troll masqueraded as a gay man to attempt to give the impression that the LGBTQ community was sheltering and welcoming paedophiles. His statements were, of course, taken at face value by a crowd of gullible right-wingers, some with major platforms, who repeated the lies because they wholeheartedly believed them to be true.

Or… is that actually what happened? As a matter of fact, no. Something slightly more sinister is occurring.

As a content warning, this post will contain examples of homophobic language and discussion of child sexual abuse.

As a werewolf who occasionally has political discussions, I notice the government tends to come up a lot.

Some discussions – almost exclusively the ones I have with right-wingers – have led me to an odd realisation: I think a lot of people don’t actually understand why governments exist, what they’re supposed to do and what responsibilities certain positions entail. There is a general understanding that the president of the United States or the primeminister of the United Kingdom is “in charge of the country,” and that the legislature “makes laws,” but not very much beyond that.

This strikes me as a problem, because governments are all at once the entity that makes decisions that affect the entire country, the entity whose decisions the country evaluates when deciding who to give power to and the entity that decides how that power is distributed.

As a werewolf who lives in the United Kingdom, I’ve found it impossible to avoid Brexit.

No, really. There’s no way of escaping this bloody nonsense. Absolutely everything even remotely political now has to be connected to Brexit in some way, from the NHS to scientific grant funding to bees. It’s frankly very tiring to talk about Brexit, so I forgive you if you’re already tuning out of this article, but worry not: I’m not going to talk about Brexit too much in this article. I’ve got a much broader question in mind, and Brexit so happens to be usefully illustrative of it.

The question is: is it ever acceptable for a government to overrule the expressed will of the majority?